The Post-Rock Band

By Gerald Marzorati

Published: October 1, 2000

Radiohead is a significant band at a bad time for significant bands. Radiohead took its name from a song by Talking Heads, which says something about Radiohead's aspirations, and something too about how self-conscious and historically freighted any aspiring band cannot help being now. Radiohead is making music at a moment when the epoch of bands would seem to be coming to a close, a moment when what is novel in popular music is being made not by groups of young men playing guitars and writing and singing their own songs but rather by individual D.J.'s and one- or two-person production teams using turntables and computers and assorted electronic gadgets. It's a moment that has the feel of a mainstream-music paradigm shift -- away from pop-rock and toward hip-hop, dance music and what gets called electronica. It's a moment nearly 40 years removed from the last big paradigm shift, secured by the advent of the first significant band, the Beatles, whom the members of Radiohead seem to talk about all the time.

Radiohead is a band that is dealing with the sea change in popular music in ways wholly unlike Limp Bizkit and the other ''rap metal'' bands whose albums have dominated the Billboard charts for the last two years -- bands that have taken the worst aspects of hip-hop (misogynist rap lyrics and monotonous beats) and fused them with heavy-metal white-guy bathos. Radiohead is a quintet whose members first met 15 years ago at the Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, England. They are not angry or wildly disaffected but serious, inward-turned and uneasy, in particular Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer. Yorke possesses one of the finest voices ever to grace a pop recording -- it circles operatically on its way to a lustrous falsetto, and it is what ultimately makes a Radiohead song a Radiohead song. Yorke is also the band's chief songwriter and driving force, or as he has put it: ''We operate like the U.N. I'm America.'' Yorke would not speak to me for some time when I joined the band on the road for several days last month in Copenhagen, and he also chooses not to speak to his fellow band members from time to time, which tends to make them even more uneasy. (''Thom can be rather . . . hard on people,'' is how Nigel Godrich, the precocious young producer who works with Radiohead, put it, choosing his words carefully, so as not to make things harder for himself, I did not doubt.)

Three years ago, Radiohead confronted the looming end of album-based, guitar-saturated, lyric-dense rock by counterintuitively releasing ''OK Computer,'' a 70's-redolent concept album stuffed with grandly contoured melodies, rigorous guitar patternings, odd time signatures, melancholy minor chords and atonal changes and weighty dystopian lyrics summoning a world of technological disasters, hypercapitalist conformity and things moving so fast that there was no longer time to do things like listen to painstakingly wrought, crepuscularly beautiful concept albums like ''OK Computer.'' (If Don DeLillo's ''Underworld'' were a rock album, it would sound like ''OK Computer.'') The kind of aging white men who edit music journals and write rock criticism and still listen to albums under headphones (and many times over again) hailed ''OK Computer'' as a masterpiece, and a lot of other people loved it, too: it was nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy and has sold, at last count, 4.7 million copies worldwide. At one of the shows I saw the band play, it seemed half the mesmerized crowd (hipster student types, mostly) were singing along to the strangest song on the album, ''Paranoid Android'' -- a song that begins with the lyric ''Please could you stop the noise I'm trying to get some rest/from all the unborn-chicken voices in my head,'' and climaxes six minutes later with a brooding Russianate chorale.

Radiohead is releasing a new album this week, its fourth. And in the music industry, which, in the wake of the success of ''OK Computer,'' has been scrambling to sign Radiohead-esque bands (Travis, Coldplay, Muse and others), the new album has created that amorphous though tinglingly palpable sense of anticipation no album by a band has generated in years. (Playing no small role in this has been Radiohead's aggressively passive rollout strategy: no advanced single for radio and no video, though MTV is showing brief video ''blips'' provided by Radiohead that feature sound bites from the album.) Titled ''Kid A,'' the new album is not a concept album, but it is, like its predecessor, one for the headphones.

''Kid A'' has one genuine rock song, ''Optimistic''; it's ja#nglingly reminiscent of R.E.M., a band whose music and artfully considered way of going about being pop musicians had a considerable influence on Radiohead early on. As for the other nine songs, many of them don't have verse-chorus structures, most of them blur at their edges beneath synthesizer- and radio-generated atmospherics and nearly all of them have lamentatory or incantatory or imperative lyrics built of fragments that might have been pulled from Tristan Tzara's hat. It is not ''difficult'' music, though, as searching as much of it is, mainly because the sonic textures Radiohead has worked up for the songs are so evocative and absorbing. Sounds from the past (a churchy harmonium, a bowed double bass, a florid, cascading harp) surge and fade amid burbling electro-beats, taped and looped vocals and computer-manipulated guitar and keyboard riffs: it's an aural palimpsest, its delights surfacing slowly, and concentrated in the rubs and the musically shaped spaces. For example, on the album's title track, the name for which was lifted from a software program of children's voices, a ravishing sound sculpture is constructed from an Old World music-box motif; a bit of jazzy drumming taped, cut and pasted; a Gramophone-era vocal melody stretched and garbled by a vocoder; and a watery foundation established by an Ondes Martinot, the protosynthesizer used by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who is much admired by Radiohead's lead guitarist and keyboard experimenter, Jonny Greenwood.